Our website brings together objects and artworks from museums and galleries across the UK, together with fascinating facts, information and curriculum-linked ideas to help bring this extraordinary period to life.

Political revolution

This section explores the striking, imaginative, and enduring ideas about equality, rights and freedoms that were put forward – and challenged – during the Age of Revolution, and some of their proponents. These included Thomas Paine, whose arguments about natural rights impacted on both the American and French revolutions, Mary Wollstonecraft who made a powerful case for educating and enfranchising women, Olaudah Equiano and others who pushed societies to challenge and eventually abolish transatlantic slavery and Marx and Engels’ who offered a powerful vision of a classless future. The American and French revolutions both demonstrated the power of the ordinary citizen and witnessed the birth of new republics, inspiring many others in their wake.

The continued calls for the reform of British politics and representation of marginalised sectors of society, and the establishment’s unprecedented measures to restrict and suppress these ‘radical’ ideas and demands.